I finished scanning Steve Meretzky’s design binders.

This was a side project and took something like nine months. I have scanned the design binders for Planetfall, Sorcerer, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Stationfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz, and of course Leather Goddesses of Phobos. In total, this is something in the range of 3,000 scanned images.

(I’m speaking of those black binders on the bottom shelf.)

It was quite a variety of stuff in there, and I really can’t credit Steve enough for keeping such amazing, complete records of his work – work which, from what I’ve encountered, that holds a special fascination for many people looking back at the history of Infocom across decades. I certainly would have been happy if it was only me who cared – but a lot of people wrote in and indicated they care, and that they appreciate what this was all about. So, on the whole, this was time very well spent. (I haven’t taken a real shot at guessing how long this took, but if I had to guess, it was probably in the neighborhood of a hundred hours.)

Bear in mind that I’m done scanning the binders but am not done scanning – there’s two more crates of documents related to general Infocom history that I’m going through as we speak, but I suspect I will only get a small amount of these before they have to be shipped away to their archival home. This would be memos, artifacts, advertising information, and so on. It’s also important, but I can only do so much while doing other stuff. So it’ll probably be a while before it all gets scanned, by persons other than me.

After the whole collection goes through a process of cleanup, removing private documents (think phone numbers, stuff somebody didn’t know was saved and didn’t want it presented in public, inc.) I’m intending to see these put in PDF form for what I hope will be legions of students and historians to go through.

Anyway, there’s a milestone for you.

Categorised as: documentary | jason his own self

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